Another permutation, in a different medium

Celebrity Big Brother, for all its trite, shallow, worthless vacuity, has caused me to stop and think.

Is it possible that the weblog phenomenon is itself an extension of “reality” broadcasting? Admittedly a weblog is able to control its content, and moderate any comments. But the end result is possibly another permutation, in a different medium, of the desire by ordinary people to observe the lives, skills, opinions etc of other ordinary people.

It’s not a pleasant thought. Correction: it is an unsettling thought.

My motive in setting up this site (conscious motive, since there might be unconscious motives that, tautologically, I am not aware of) has been to record the world as I see it – the sights I see, the things that happen to me, my thoughts on why things happen. I tell myself that for all my bluff as a marketing professional, I am really an historian, and that my duty is to create an historical record for posterity, irrespective of whether anyone currently reads it or not (I hope there are current readers, but I'm not going to depend upon them).

I see myself as writing for the future – fifty, a hundred, even two hundred years from now graduate history students will illustrate their researches by references to weblogs of the early twenty-first century. I see this as a noble enterprise, making immortal the ordinary things / people / places that are around me. I see the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane carefully collecting the weblogs of the ordinary people and storing them away to be discovered years hence (possibly subject to a 50-year publication rule).

But perhaps I’m just fooling myself. Perhaps I’m just another performer in the “reality” arena. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity (as they say).